Evergreen Storage: A New Approach

For decades, the limitations of spinning disks have held back data center efficiency and constricted architecture decision-making. These performance bottlenecks have impacted not only storage infrastructure decisions, but also decisions involving application deployment, server, and networking configurations, and power and cooling. To meet the performance requirements of business-critical workloads, IT administrators often employed what could be considered today as unnatural acts to improve storage performance. For example, disk striping and the various RAID configurations, such as RAID 10 and 50, that leverage disk striping were designed to attempt to aggregate multiple spinning drives to increase the collective performance. It was also common for organizations to deploy far more capacity than was necessary or to significantly reduce the accessible capacity of a drive via short stroking all to increase performance. These techniques were not only common, but also best practices recommended by application vendors. Thankfully, those days are fading into the sunset as the dawn of a new era of storage rises with the emergence of solid-state storage solutions, such as the all-flash array.

Even as more organizations adopt solid-state storage and integrate it into their environments, however, the remnants of old storage architectural design paradigms exist. One example, the scale-out storage architecture, enables a storage pool to scale performance and capacity simultaneously by adding incremental storage nodes that offer a combination of processing, memory, and disk capacity. This model provided simplicity to spinning disk environments, where incremental capacity was often required to increase performance. But in the era of solid-state storage, this model often introduces inefficiencies. Additionally, though not as antiquated as short stroking, many of the benefits of scale-out storage designs offered to spinning disk media can be achieved by leveraging alternative means.

Modern governments across Europe must orchestrate an evolving array of services and functions required to support millions of people, often with a pressure to “do more with less” and under the glare of public scrutiny.

The pressure to harness technology to transform is as evident in government as it is in any modern organisation, although the complexity and reach of government is arguably more significant. Ongoing uncertainties around Brexit are likely adding to the challenge of transforming operational models and efficiency.

Transitioning to citizen-centric service delivery, Brexit planning, implementing new digital services and adopting an evidence-based policy development are all transformational undertakings for the UK government and its departments. Thankfully, they all have one critical success factor in common: data. It is the fuel of digital transformation and without fast, always-on access to data, everything will stall. By everything, we mean all data-driven ambitions from the development of new models of service delivery that improve the quality of public ...

Network engineering and operations leaders are looking to software-defined wide- area networks (SD-WAN) to support the influx of traffic and applications driven by digital transformation (DX). These applications improve staff productivity while creating new business opportunities, but they also reshape corporate networking and security needs.

In response, many organizations are beginning to rethink their traditional WAN architecture. SD WAN has emerged as a replacement, but many SD-WAN implementations also present serious challenges—from ina ...

Most organizations are in the midst of some form of digital innovation (DI) - leveraging technology to achieve specific goals—and ultimately deliver greater value to their customers. But DI also brings disruption. Disruption in the form of an expanded attack surface and the introduction of a more sophisticated threat landscape. Disruption can also lead to increased complexity as organizations try to counter these new threats with a range of new security solutions. Finally, maintaining compliance with relevant industy and regulatory standards su ...

In any organization, being responsible for cybersecurity is a complex job entailing interactions with the teams managing software development, servers, databases, storage, and networking. It becomes even more challenging where there is also a need to protect industrial installations and the Operational Technology (OT) that runs them in critical industries such as manufacturing, energy, and extraction.

Although it is not always on the OT security team’s radar, in the IT networking world Software Defined Wide Area Network, or SD-WAN, is the ho ...